It’s taken a lot of research but we have finally bitten the bullet and purchased a new Firing System for our company Cotswold Fireworks. There is a huge range of systems available now and when you look, each system will have its positives and negatives. When we started our company in 1998, the choice was pretty much Fire One or Pyromate.

Now the choice is more complicated but at least you can pick something that suits the way you work along with something that is affordable. All I will say is spend plenty of time researching what is out there and where possible see if you can beg or borrow a system to test before laying down your hard earned cash.

What you are seeing in the picture is the Master controller FM-99s and one Module FTH-48s (called an Interface). Each interface can take 4 x 12 port slats giving 49 ports per interface.

The system is wireless but also CAN Bus (two pair wire), can take an external trigger pulse (two pair wire) and also use a small 444Mhz wireless keyfob in place of the trigger pulse wire.

It also has Bluetooth so yes you could fire from your Android phone using the supplied app.

Each Interface and Master controller can also take a timecode input giving even greater flexibility.

The FM-99s can play an audio file to a sound system meaning no more CD players onsite for us.

This system has tons of features and I’ve only listed a few above. It’s going to take a while to write about what it can do but not only does it replace our current (home made) system (which is trigger pulse only) but it complements it. FireTEK is the first system I have tested which will happily fire the triggers on my home made system and also the Merlin Match SE modules that I also own.

More updates to follow as we get to grips with what the amazing FireTEK can do for us.